A Pleasure to Make Your Acquaintance: Tips for Introducing Your Character in Roleplay

Written by Neyla

One of the most challenging aspects of roleplaying, as well as writing,
is the balance of scene and dialogue. Both aspects of writing are
critical to pulling the intended audience into your character and making
them want to come back from more. While I'm not too concerned about
dialogue for this piece, suffice to say that I will probably try and
cover it later. I consider it one of those things that everyone sort of
"knows” instinctively from simply being social animals but it does never
hurt to brush up. For now though let's talk about scene and what scene
means to RP.

First off, there are two types of scenes' (also called exposition) in
writing and roleplay: action and description. Action is any form of
exposition that progresses a storyline while description is any form of
exposition that gives greater detail to the current location of the
storyline. Simply put for roleplay, action is what your character is
doing and description is what your character is.

In my observations the most common problem regarding description is a
process known as "info-dumping”. Info-dumping is where the author or
roleplayer gives the reader too much information in a single burst. An
example of an ingame intro post that might be considered an info-dump:

"The Bosmer walking into the bar was tall for her species, though she
was only of average height for a human. She wore simple leather armor
accented with various bones from a boar carcass, such as the ribs
hugging her waist and the skull severed into two parts and mounted on
her shoulders. She had a rugged and firm build, and even though her skin
wasn't exposed you could tell she had hardened abs and well-sculpted
arms. Her sword was of Akaviri design, though not of Akaviri origin. It
was long and narrow with a slight bend in the blade, sharp along its
whole length. The pommel and grip was wrapped in leather and soaked in
red dye giving it a ghastly appearance. Her face was rugged as well with
various small nicks and bruises on her cheeks -the signs of a weary
adventurer. Along her belt were healing potions and known salves and
powders. She wore an amulet of Mara hung off of her belt buckle but one
could see she wasn't looking for a husband.”

And so on and so on and so on. The first immediate problem of info dumps
in a roleplaying environment is that they're loooooong. That
introduction was 177 words, or 954 characters, or 6.8 text messages.
Depending on the character limit of the MMO an introduction post like
this takes up to 3 messages, completely monopolizing the chat window for
some individuals. I've seen bigger introductions than this, and I've
seen them in the middle of a crowded tavern. Whether or not this is good
etiquette or not is debatable, but it is certainly not good writing.

The second problem is that it's simply too much information. Gritty
hyper-realism has it's place, but I personally don't see that place
being in roleplay or most forms of writing. One of the many qualities of
a good writer or roleplayer is the ability to give the audience exactly
what they need to know when they need to know it, and not a detail
more. In the above example, I'm giving way too much information about my
character. There's no need for the majority of the details in it or the
long exposition about her sword and what's on her belt. By adding all
of these details into a single massive post it actually causes the post
to lose focus and dim the image of the character and can come off as
jarring and overloaded.

Take the following example:

"The Bosmer walking into the bar was average height for a human, and
rugged and dirtied in appearance. She wore leather armor accented in
bone and had a Akaviri sword clamoring at her waist along with healing
potions and the tools and ingedients of a temple healer.”

Here I have achieved nearly exactly the same imagery of the Bosmer,
while also cutting the introduction down to 47 words and 265 characters
-small enough to fit into a single chat message. In tavern roleplay this
can be critical to maintaining the flow of conversation, because having
to split a message in two will surely cause others to post in between
each half. Optionally I could even take it a step further and just only
describe things not rendered on her character model or armor, since its
already viewable to the player.

Later in the roleplay I can always trickle details about her armor and
sword or face to my partner, and it'll be far less jarring to do that
than to front load all of my character's detail in the first two posts.
Not only is it jarring but in many cases it can cause a reader to start
skimming and possibly just infer the rest of the introduction without
even reading it. As a general rule though I should leave out description
of anything that isn't relevant to the story or conversation though. If
her sword isn't going to be used in the story, just leave it out then.
If someone is appraising her armor though, I should oblige and give out
those details.

Another small tweak one can do with character description is to try and
avoid describing the character at all in scene. To do so 100% is both
impossible and can diminish the quality of the writing, but minimizing
it can increase the presence of your character. By reducing exposition
of your character, you will have to use dialogue to get your character's
description out there. If my Bosmer walks up to another character and
tells them that they've just gotten back from a campaign, I've already
said a lot about my character in just a single sentence. Not only that
but I've opened up a door of conversation that could potentially lead to
a whole other tangent. If my Bosmer walks up to someone else and says
they're seven months pregnant, one can intuitively piece together a
description of my character's appearance and mannerisms without me
having to spell it out for them. Of course, this is highly dependent on
your character and if they aren't the talker, then description is
important.

Finally, and this is important to action as well as descriptions, one
can overladen their messages with adjectives and adverbs. Like the
challenging and rewarding art and science of cooking, one should only
use their powerful and delicious spices sparingly to avoid accidentally
and tragically drowning their would-be savory and well-prepared gourmet
dishes. Just say what you want to say, and leave the adjectives at home.
The only time an adjective or adverb is really needed is if there is a
profound (and I mean profound) difference between the unmodified word
and the modified word: Bloodied sword vs. sword as opposed to sparkling
ruby necklace vs. ruby necklace. Otherwise, season sparingly.

As with all aspects of writing: stay true to your voice. If you have a
particular way of writing and it works well for you, then there is no
reason to change it. If you have a particular paragraph that is running a
little long but you can't find any more fat to trim, then it's probably
just fine. Just always keep in mind that in writing and especially MMO
roleplay that less can be more and walls of text aren't the only or even
the best way to get the image of your character out there.